[gentoo-dev] Re: Quantity of open bugs

[Duncan]

Kevin F. Quinn posted on Thu, 10 Mar 2011 20:25:10 +0000 as excerpted:

> Hi all,
>
> I was nosing through bugzilla, and noticed:
>
> * Number of open bugs is greater than 14,000
> * open bugs untouched > 2 years - well over 2000.
> * open bugs untouched 1 - 2 years - well over 2000.
> * open bugs untouched 6 mo to 1 year - well over 2000.
> * open bugs untouched 3 - 6 months - over 2000
>
> The winner is bug #78406, which hasn't been touched for over 2240 days -
> over 6 years - at the time of writing.
>
> I would guess these old untouched bugs aren't actually going to be
> touched, ever - a lot simply won't be relevant any more for one reason
> or another.  All they're doing is cluttering up bugzilla.
>
>
> So I'd like to suggest a drastic, perhaps controversial action.  Mark
> all bugs that haven't been touched for over (say) 3 months as
> "Resolved:Wontfix", with a polite comment saying that it is closed due
> to lack of resource amongst the volunteer developer community.

You have a point, but for the way Gentoo works, 3 months is rather too 
short.  Gentoo tracks all sorts of not-ordinarily-considered-bugs as bugs, 
and some of the stuff tracked is long-term projects.  I've had (gentoo 
initscript feature) bugs complete with patches sit for > six months, 
before the Gentoo package maintainer had time to look at it and say yeah, 
the idea looks good.  Another user ended up updating the patch before it 
was applied, as stuff /had/ changed, but it /was/ eventually applied.  
Meanwhile, both the other user and I (and who knows if anyone else) had 
been using the feature in our own initscripts, keeping it working, etc, 
but the package didn't turn over /that/ frequently, and over a year to 
resolve with a six-month and a three-month idle period wasn't /that/ bad 
-- certainly considering that the patch and feature ultimately got in, and 
it wouldn't have with your proposal unless someone simply bumped the bug 
for no other reason than to keep it open.

Arguably, a year might be better, or possibly six months, but certainly, 
the auto-close message should urge the user to re-open if it's still 
appropriate.  But I'm not sure even that will go over well.  Maybe two 
years or five years...  because arguably at five years, no matter what the 
bug is, if it's still valid, it really /needs/ updated, since so much 
around it will have changed.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman